SNAFT - Simplified Native American Flute Tablature

SNAFT is an easy notation for writing fingerings (which finger holes are open and closed) in character form. It works great
in E-Mail messages and simple text files. For example, rather than saying “keep all your fingers down except for the bottom two holes furthest away from the end you blow into”, you can just write <xxx|xoo.

It was originally developed by Randy Goodhew.
The version that I present here has some minor modifications to his
original design.

Basic SNAFT

The basic characters of SNAFT are:

Character

Meaning

<

Mouth end of the flute … always at the left

x

Hole closed

o

Hole open

h

Hole is half closed

|

The break between the left and right hand

SNAFT is written left to right, with the mouth hole always at the left.
Some examples:

Accessibility

You may notice in the example above that a tooltip pops up in your browser if you rest over the SNAFT examples.
(A tooltip is a pop-up window provided by some browsers that shows the title of an item).
You may also notice that the tooltip shows a vocalized version of the SNAFT text.